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The trip home was not terribly eventful, and more pleasant than I expected -- I'd forgotten how much I love flying. I just think there's something amazing about the fact of being able to look down at clouds. My check luggage didn't make it here with me, but no worries, it's just clothing and linens, nothing urgent. And now that I'm home, I've been to check out the animals and garden outside, and found that 100+ degree weather doesn't really feel that bad. The dryness helps enormously.

I ate very little today. I didn't pack any food and the airline didn't give me much, but the weird thing is that when I got home I only nibbled at Elizabeth's lentils, which seemed really filling. I think the culprit is the lack of exercise involved in sitting in airplanes all day. I also find that my addiction to beans & veggies is already inconveniencing me.

It's a pity there's no time before school starts to do some gardening with Jephthah.

There's a lot to say about this week and last. I could describe the snake incident, the bat incident, the fainting incident (scary but she turned out to be okay; attended to by an experienced EMT who can estimate blood pressure by holding your wrist, and the local witch doctor), last Friday's costume party in which costumes seemed to get skimpier and more scandalous with the increasing age of the wearer, last night's contra dancing at a nearby university (very like square dancing -- I caught on pretty quickly), and the food (I'll dearly miss quinoa and proper cooking greens when I get home, but I won't miss having milkless oatmeal or grits for breakfast). My home for the summer, Medicine Wheel House, has 10 people currently living here, with a couple more expected later. A few more people share in our kitchen plan and eat here several times a week as well as taking their turn cooking dinner. We each sign up for a cleaning chore on a weekly basis, and larger projects are handled by those of us who are work exchanging for our rent. Projects are scheduled for various days, but we have considerable freedom to manage our workload and decide how much time to put in any given day. Surprisingly perhaps, everything generally runs fairly smoothly and even the kitchen counters tend to stay reasonably clean. (Unfortunately, I think the only lesson to take back from this is that our house would be much nicer if we all worked/studied no more than part time and did so only within walking distance of home.) The big project right now has been repairing the gutters which were damaged by snow last winter, and the rainwater collection system which subsequently clogged with dead leaves. I'm also helping with the construction of a one-room cabin for one of the residents right next to the big house. It's really fun to work for her because she basically gives us free reign to figure out how to do things like put in windows, and doesn't mind if they come out lopsided or funny-looking. I've also done a lot of digging on various projects, which I've actually rather enjoyed, because digging here in soft clay-silt soil is a completely different experience from hacking your way through caliche in Dallas. In the forest garden so far I've cut grass on trails, split bamboo and woven it into a wire grid to make a fence, piled up stones and dirt to fill in in front of the greenhouse, taken a layer of plastic off the greenhouse, picked cherries, mulberries and (domestic) strawberries, transplanted jack-in-the-pulpits to a safe location, and watched the Forest Children perform a play. Everywhere I go I've been bitten by mosquitos and no-see-ums (which everyone complains about, but it's the mosquitos that drive me nuts) and scratched until I have scabs all over my legs, and many places I've been exposed to poison ivy, which seems to be one of the most common plants here. They don't seem to have any greenbriar here, which I actually found disappointing because it's one of the few edible plants I know how to deal with. I'm still embarrassingly confused about all the different plants growing in our garden, and how to tell cooking greens from salad greens.

So I haven't learned any arcane secrets of ecological living, but I am having a lovely time here. Group living situations like this suit me well, and I really like the folks here at Medicine Wheel. It's great to take a break from many of my connections with the outside world and give myself a chance to relax and focus more on the present. I haven't noticed myself getting any stronger physically (I'm a total wimp compared to just about everyone here), but I haven't ached in a while. My first few days here, I woke up feeling like Sophie must have after the Wicked Witch of the Waste turned her into an old woman. I'm also improving on the guitar.

Jephthah would absolutely love it here. I think Mama would find it interesting too, although she'd probably not want to live in most of the buildings -- they were mostly built by amateurs and have all sorts of small irregularities which I don't really notice but which I'm sure would really annoy either of my parents.

I still haven't settled on a regular sleep schedule, but this is probably far later than I should have stayed up. Good night.

My bedroom is on the third floor of the house where I'm staying. It's small and cozy, and has a nice view of the front yard and the trees beyond. The rest of the house is quite spacious, with common rooms on every floor. It's hard to judge the size, but it certainly feels larger than our place in Dallas. There are sinks and showers with hot water -- the only difficult thing to adjust to is the absence of indoor toilets. There are numerous large and well-stocked bookshelves, which give the place quite a homey feel. The books seem to be arranged somewhat randomly, and include well known titles like the Harry Potter series, The Screwtape Letters, and various Tolkien, as well as some New Agey stuff, sustainability-related topics, classics, and plenty that I don't know how to classify. Most of it was completely unfamiliar, but Barbara Kingsolver is well represented, so I grabbed one of her novels for whenever I next crave a book. There's also Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, and Che Guevara's Motorcycle Diaries. I haven't made arrangements yet to borrow a library card -- I need to see who will least mind me logging on to the website in their name, paying for interlibrary loans (at $3 a book, according to the website, this is likely to be my biggest expenditure next to hygiene items), and hopefully not incurring any fines for late items.

Speaking of costs, we went to a place called Greenlife Grocery for toiletries, and it cost me almost 45 bucks. I didn't even get shampoo! The cheap toothpaste is $4.79 a smallish tube, and is "formulated according to the ancient holistic system of Ayurveda." At least all of its ingredients seem to actually come from plants. With a lot of these products, "natural" means a few obscure plant extracts added to the usual synthetic chemicals. But you can get an astonishing variety of products that are, in fact, natural.

The kitchen has a delightful array of dried herbs to brew tea from. I had some lemon balm last night and it was absolutely delicious. There's also a much more extensive set of spices than what I'm used to working with, meaning I'll have the unusual experience of looking at recipes and actually being able to follow them to the letter. For breakfast today I stuck with the familiar and made scrambled eggs & onions, and for lunch I had warmed leftover vegetables and sweet potatoes. I don't think I'll miss meat, bread, or other processed foods at all. Milk, however, I might have to get next time I'm in town. Some folks from here pool their money to buy raw organic cow's milk occasionally, but at $8/gallon, I'm thinking I can manage without for now.

Maybe it just hasn't sunk in yet, but it doesn't feel all that odd to be living in the middle of a forest. It reminds me somewhat of the various ranches I've been on retreats, only with a much nicer place to sleep, and in-house kitchen instead of mess hall. What came to mind this morning, though, was Aunt Elaine's house on the hill in Bambu, if you approach it via the trail up from the old house. There is actually a dirt road that winds all the way to a driveway in the front yard, though I think this place is probably a little hard on cars.

This morning I got started working in the forest garden. It is exactly what the name suggests -- a garden in a forest. The plants are an interesting mix of cultivated and wild varieties, basically whatever the gardeners could get their hands on and liked. If a useful plant is growing there we leave it, or move it to somewhere it won't be stepped on and/or will get the optimal amount of sunlight. Currently the strawberries and mulberries are ripe. Unfortunately the mulberry tree(s?) are too tall and skinny to pick fruit directly from, so we may try shaking them onto a sheet. A lot of the plants all look very alike to me, and since my boss is still learning about them herself, she can't always tell me what they are. I'm really wishing now I'd accepted Jephthah's offer of his edible plants guide! One thing I can recognize, though, is poison ivy, which is EVERYWHERE. I'm taking what precautions I can, but it's probably inevitable that I'll wind up with at least a minor rash.

There's a stream just on the other side of the road from us. I can hear it quite loudly through my window. It sounds surprisingly like the highway traffic noises we get at home.

Our internet connection is DSL. It works pretty well, but since only one or two people can comfortably use it at a time, I'm rediscovering the experience of using my computer without being hooked up to the internet. I'm thinking it'd be handy to have an email client to work offline with -- anyone know of a good one?